Sand

35 • Oasis

The sarfer crunched across the sand and slowed to a stop. Sand hissed against the bright red sail and spilled over the edge of the boom in a veil. Vic lowered the sail and studied the depression between the dunes. A handful of stumps poked feebly toward the sky, but whatever tall trees had lived there had long ago been butchered. Between the stumps there was a dark spot of sand, almost if the sun were casting a shadow. It was no oasis, but it would do.

She jumped down to the sand and helped her brother out of the haul rack. The small bimini she’d made to keep him in the shade was already tattered and threadbare from the half day of sailing due south. Part of her wanted to press on to Springston and get there before dark. The rest of her felt sure her brother wouldn’t make it that far without water.

His head listed from side to side as Vic gathered him in her arms. He weighed little more than a tank and a gear bag. Vic lowered him to the line of shaded sand by the sarfer’s hull and grabbed Marco’s dive suit from the gear she’d crammed into his helm chair. She folded the suit several times, lifted Palmer’s head, and slid the pillow between him and the sand.

Palmer asked for water. Vic slung her canteen around from her back and shook it. Empty. “Hang in there,” she said. “I’m getting you some.”

She left him in the shade. Back at the helm, her own dive suit was plugged into the small wind generator that poked up from the aft of the sarfer. She unplugged this, stripped down in the hot sun, grabbed scoops of sand and rubbed it over her armpits and her sweaty chest, then brushed herself off as best she could. She tugged on the dive suit, which was hot and smelled like melting rubber. Tears wetted her cheeks. She cursed these and wiped them away. Her brother was dying. Her brother was a pile of chapped and sunburnt bones. It horrified her to see him that way. Horrified her to think of Marco, her lover, dead. Killed right in front of her. And now she was going to lose a brother, too.

She dug her visor out of her gear bag, wiped her cheeks again, and promised herself that it wouldn’t happen. Not Palmer. Through clenched teeth, she promised. No one else would die that day. No one. She slung Marco’s canteen over her head. It rattled emptily against hers and Palmer’s. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She scanned the horizon for sarfer masts, had seen dozens in the distance on the sail south, but none right then. Supine on the sand by the sarfer’s hull, Palmer looked peaceably asleep. This is what she told herself as she powered on her suit and disappeared beneath the sand.

Palmer lay alone on the warm sand and stared at the dark patch his sister had vanished into. The minutes ticked by like hours. The crows that’d followed them as they’d sailed south circled overhead. His sister had taken his canteen. Hap’s canteen, the one with his name etched into the side. Palmer remembered the dive they’d been on when Hap had carved his name there with his dive knife. They’d left their gear buried in the sand. Hap had been worried they might get their canteens mixed up. Same models. Both new. So young then. Worried about whose was what. Worried about sharing. Tenuous friends. A lifetime ago.

More minutes went by. Palmer stared out over the desert sand. Vic had emptied her canteen into his mouth one cap at a time. His stomach was in knots. Springston and hope felt so very far away. And where could they go once they got there? People wanted him dead. He remembered the way Hap’s body had been twisted out of shape. What the hell had he gotten himself involved in? And for what? Some coin?

A crow swooped down and lighted on the sarfer. The mainsail flapped, and the bird flapped back. It pecked the aluminum with its beak, the reaper rapping to be let in. Palmer waved his arm and begged it to go. He wondered what he would do if Vic didn’t come back. How long before the sun slid overhead and his shade dwindled to nothing? How long before another diver or a brigand found the sarfer with its flapping sail? How long?

The crow startled, and with a beat of its black wings, labored into the sky. Palmer heard a deep gasp. He turned to see Vic sliding up out of the ground, sand cascading off her and catching in the breeze. She took deep breaths. Rested on the sand for a moment. And then she flipped up her visor and startled Palmer with the barest of smiles.

36 • A Note from Father

“We’re gonna put a tear in Father’s tent,” Rob warned. He could see at once what his older brother had planned, could tell by the way he was knotting the ropes. It wasn’t going to be good for the tent.

“This is our tent,” Conner said, correcting him. “Yours and mine. Not Father’s. And we can’t very well carry her all the way to town.”

Conner went back to his knots, and Rob watched his brother work in the pale light of the starry sky. The horizon was beginning to lighten beyond No Man’s Land, out where the sporadic bootfalls of stomping giants could be heard. The sun would be up within an hour, by his estimate.

He turned back to the girl and watched her sleep. They had moved their bedding and the girl out onto the sand in order to collapse the tent. She lay flat on her back with her head to the east and her feet to the west. Sand gathered in her hair. She might appear to be dead were it not for the imperceptible rise and fall of her chest, which lay partly exposed by the rip in her shirt. Rob reached over and pulled the fabric shut, covering her pale flesh. He had watched as Conner had cleaned her wounds. His brother had two extra canteens of water and all kinds of bandages and supplies in his pack. Rob didn’t ask about these things. He knew what they were for. He didn’t ask why Conner had been out of the tent in the middle of the night. He knew where Conner was going. It scared him to think of being alone, but that’s what Conner had planned. Rob kept all this to himself. He often saw how things worked, how they fit together, and had long given up on explaining these things to those older than him. Adults just looked at him with strange expressions when he spoke his insights, like they didn’t believe him. Or were frightened of him. Or both.

“If you’re done fondling her breasts, you can grab my pack and stop this damn tent from flapping.”

Rob grabbed Conner’s pack. No point telling him he wasn’t fondling her breasts. It would just sound like he had been. Silence would sound the same way, too. Didn’t matter either way, so he saved his breath. He carried Conner’s pack and set it on the folded tent opposite where his brother was knotting the lines. The fabric stopped flopping around in that pre-dawn breeze.

“Make a pillow for her. Up here where her head will go.” His brother sounded annoyed. No, something worse than that. Conner wasn’t being himself. He sounded scared and unsure. Rob didn’t like that.

“We should put her head back here and drag her feet-first,” Rob told his older brother. “To keep the wind and sand out of her face.”

Conner studied him a moment. That look. “Whatever,” he said. It’s what adults said instead of: You’re right.

The girl was moved onto the sand for a moment. The bedding went onto the tent, and then the girl went back onto the bedding. All their gear was arranged on the flat canvas, which was now like a sarfer with no skids and no sail. Just two sets of lines to shoulder. It was a long way back into town, but neither Rob nor his brother complained as they adjusted their kers, draped the ropes over their shoulders, and leaned into the task.

“What if she dies before we get there?” Rob asked.

“She won’t.”

“But how do you know?”

“I just do, okay? Now shut up and do your share or we’ll go in circles.”

Rob pulled. He counted his steps. Whenever he could, he counted anything that could be counted. A few years back, he and Conner’s camping trip had come on a windless night, and when the fire had died down to coals and the stars had burst bright, he had counted five thousand two hundred and fifty-eight stars before he couldn’t be sure if he was counting the same ones over again. Numbers calmed him in a way that words couldn’t. If he thought with words, they went around in circles and crashed into each other and grew more dire and terrifying, just like they were right then as he forgot to count steps and remembered that camping trip and worried they were dragging a dead girl across the sand.

“She made it out of No Man’s Land,” Conner finally said, as if he could sense Rob’s worry. “She’ll make it to town.”

Rob didn’t argue. He dug his boots into the sand and tried to do as much work as his brother. He could feel a blister forming on the back of his heel. He was tired. They’d only gone to sleep what felt like a few hours ago.

“What’re the chances someone would show up on this night?” Rob asked his brother. “This night of all nights?”

“Not good,” Conner said. “The same as dropping a grain of sand and then finding it again. Those are the chances.”

Rob thought so too. “She said she had a… a message from Father.” He grunted between words from the effort of the haul.

“She was delirious. Keep quiet and pull. Let’s head to the right a little and around that next dune. Get in the lee.”

Rob obeyed. He kept his thoughts to himself. Which meant he couldn’t know if Conner was piecing together all that he was piecing together. Coincidences didn’t make sense, but if they did happen, they could get you thinking really strange thoughts. He knew a boy in Shantytown—a kid in his class—whose roof had caved in twice, both times on his birthday, six years apart. It had buried him in drift both times, but they had dug him out. Now he sleeps under the stars every birthday and won’t listen to sense about it. He also hates the number six. And as much as Rob found this silly, he was pretty sure he’d be the same way if that had happened to him.

And now his brain was whirling with all kinds of new facts. People came out from No Man’s Land. That wasn’t supposed to be a thing. So maybe Old Man Joseph wasn’t so crazy after all. Old Man Joseph claimed to have been to the other end of No Man’s Land and returned, but no one believed him. But maybe. And maybe Father was alive out there somewhere. Maybe he had sent this girl to them. And if so, he had sent her to arrive on the night he and his brother would be there. But there was something else about what she had said—

“Hey, Conner?”

“Jesus, Rob, what the fuck is it?”

“She didn’t say ‘your’ father. She just said Father.”

“Save it, Rob. I’m thinking.”

Rob felt the blister on his heel go. Raw flesh began to rub. Sand would get in, and then the real hurting would begin.

“I’m thinking too, you know.” He bit his lip and tried not to limp, tried to be strong. His brother took a deep breath beside him.

“I know. I’m sorry. What’re you thinking, little brother?”

“I’m thinking the way she said Father, it was like hers and ours are the same one.”

They reached the lee of a great dune, and the whispering wind fell quiet and the rushing sand was no longer at their ankles but high above their heads. Conner eventually answered.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” he finally said.

37 • The Sand-Filled Screams of the Dying

A pad of paper spelled out the bad news in a single column of numbers. There was more subtraction than addition taking place. Rose would’ve been happy to break even, for every dollar earned to be a dollar spent. But rarely were such balances kept. If there was a zero-sum game, it was played among a host of winners and losers. Businesses like hers going under—literally, more often than not—while riches piled elsewhere to the heavens. Coin was like sand in this way: it only flowed in one direction. And to compound the misery of those to the west, these two currents of woe ran counter to one another. The poor shipped off their coin to the east and got buckets of sand in return.

It was the damn water prices. The cost per liter had nearly doubled that year, which meant a near doubling in the price of beer. And the Ladies of the Balcony still needed their showers. Not so much for their clients to stand them—clients who could hardly be expected to nose their wares over their own stench—but so the ladies could stand themselves. Rose had put it off longer than she should have. She’d have to jack up the price of a pint and hike the room rates again. There would be bitching and moaning when she announced the both; people would act as though she were gouging for the fun of it. Truth was, the whole place would shut down if they had another month like this.

The din of activity beyond her door, of people spending money, served as temporary comfort. News of Danvar’s discovery had the divers in a mood. Even the Lords seemed interested. They were already scrambling for who might have title based on mineral claims, arguing and spilling beer on ancient maps. Rose had seen this play out before. There would be a frenzy of spending all the spoils one hoped to make. This would be followed by the lean times of those same gamblers asking for loans and handouts. People hardly took a breath between these extremes. It was the stagger home of a drunk who could hit every dune on either side as he lurched a thousand paces in what he might’ve crossed in ten.

But Rose knew a slow rise could lead to just as precipitous a fall. She had married a man who’d decried such fits of gluttonous frenzy. Her husband had made his gradual fortune, had climbed a slope of infamy up that peaceful dune to the heights of the great wall, and had stepped right off just as neatly. All he might have left her was snapped up by villainous thugs who gave themselves title and who thought a bath and a clean robe made them natural born princes. She had been left with nothing but the Honey Hole, which her husband had won in a game of dice.

It had only been a place to stay the night she was tossed out with her children. But then it had been a business to manage, her only source of income. She took care of the girls and tended the bar, grew some vegetables on the roof, whatever it took to keep the water flowing. But each passing week drew the noose tighter and tighter around her neck. She looked for a buyer, but who would buy a place that barely broke even? Everyone else got their pay, she made sure of that. The drunks who swept up in the mornings for a pint made more profit than she. There was nothing left for Rose after the school fees for the kids, after the dive gear Palmer and Vic needed in order to not lose their spots. There was nothing left to help them start a life of their own, help them open a business, rent a stall in the market, anything. Nothing but mounting costs. Piles of coin transmuted into piles of resentment. Resentment that left her bitter toward her husband for bolting in the night, for leaving her a tent and a whorehouse to choose between.

For a long while, she’d only tended to the men at the bar, only slaked that thirst. But there were long hours of thinking how tight the money was, and the joking offers came fast and loose. They were made with a laugh, but there was always the dangle and jangle of coin. “Hey Rose, I give you fifty to go upstairs right now.” “Hey Rose, one hundred. Just scored big-time down in Low-Pub.” “Hey Rose.” “Hey Rose.” “Hey Rose.”

There was one night where a hundred and twenty coin was enough. This was the cost. Enough to pierce some membrane within her, some barrier she would’ve sworn could not be crossed; but it had been worn down over months and months of lean times. Worn so thin the right words could make it through.

The offer came from a customer she knew well enough, might have dated if they’d been sitting on the same side of the bar, if they’d been around any other bar, in any other place, at any other time. She would’ve had sex with him for nothing, the way a respectable woman does. Instead, she let him pay. And it wasn’t bad. He cared. Asked her if that felt okay. Did all the work. Didn’t hit her or spank her or ask if he could choke her a little. Pulled out and even cleaned her up with his shirt. She would’ve done it for free. Nearly told him so as he left stacks of coin on her dresser. Fragile, wobbly things, all that coin. Like the tall scrapers to the east.

And then he went back to the bar, and Rose sat and stared at the towers of coin on that dresser her husband had left her, and it was a different woman who walked out that door. She would survive, she realized. But it would be a different her. It would be someone else who did the surviving, who would drag memories of a former self along, a tiny echo of a woman somewhere deep in her skull, a small voice of who she used to be.

When Palmer had come asking for a little help the next day, it had felt different. He was fourteen back then, and Rose thought he could see. She thought he knew. She sure as hell did, and the same ten coin that he asked for and always got suddenly weighed the same as ten thousand. Palmer pocketed it too easily. Like it was the same coin. But it’d been too hard won for that. Not to slide away so easy. Not to just disappear. And here was when the gulf with her children opened. It opened not the day her legs had, but the day her palms did. It was the only way, she told herself. There was no other. She would earn her keep the only way she could. And the cost of dispensing that keep could only grow.

It was inevitable that her children would find out. Men don’t just talk, they brag. They brag about rented love, even. And children hear everything. They are echo chambers. And they take what they learn from their parents off to school more readily than they haul anything of merit home. A father’s boast becomes a way to torment a peer. And so the boys heard about her new line of work from the worst source possible.

No, not quite. Vic had heard about it from someone even worse than the boys. A client. A young man who made a flippant comparison, who thought it might be taken as a compliment, who had said in the heat of passion that the daughter was more expert than the mother.

Vic had already stopped coming around the Honey Hole, wouldn’t even approach the place. And after this, she wouldn’t agree to see Rose anywhere. Not for three long years. And so her children began to wither like the roof gardens did when showers and beer water took precedence. They began to die to her and she to them. Even as the small voice she carried deep within her soul relented now and then and dispensed with hard-fought coin. Even though some part of her left her pillow wet in the morning as it leaked out in quiet sobs. Leaked out, but never emptied.

All this and more, her husband had taken the day he’d run off. All this and more he had stolen. But she would survive. Rose told herself this as she studied the column of numbers where more was subtracted than added. There was a knock at the door. She checked her watch. It was her six o’clock.

Oh yes, she would survive.

38 • No Place for a Girl

The sun was up by the time the boys entered Springston and swung around the edge of the great wall. There was still shade in that part of town where people could afford to delay the rising sun and be sheltered from the creep of sand. And though it was early and a Sunday, Conner felt something was amiss. There was that nervous buzz about town like after a bomb had gone off—but bombs rarely went off so early in the day. The young men who caused violence were as lazy as any youth when it came to getting out of bed. And besides, there were no columns of smoke. No wailing mothers. Instead, there were the sails of sarfers spread out to the horizon. There was an empty marina with bare hitching posts jutting out of the ground and only the wind passing through. There were people in front of their homes, talking with neighbors, out and about, even though the markets had not yet opened.

“Head left here,” Conner told his brother. There was a doctor on the edge of Springston that sometimes took people in from Shantytown. He might help them. He might be trusted if he found out where the girl came from.

Where the girl came from. Conner chanced a look over his shoulder. She could be sleeping or dead. She could be someone who wandered into No Man’s Land with her family and turned back after two days of hiking. But she had spoken his name. Had mentioned his father. If she died, would anyone believe their account of things? Or would he become Old Man Joseph, standing at the intersection of the great dunes, holding a sign, screaming to frightened kids about No Man’s Land?

These were the thoughts swirling in his mind long before the sun came up. Conner couldn’t stop thinking of all the girl might know, might say, if she survived. Their father might still be alive. Twelve years of camping on the edge of No Man’s Land, twelve years of listening to the wind moan across the Bull’s gash, twelve years of Shantytown, of their mother selling herself, and their father might still be out there.

Conner outpulled Rob, his legs pumping as his thoughts raced. They rounded the corner and stopped outside Doc Welsh’s place—

“Closed,” Rob said.

There was a sign on the door. Half the stalls they had passed were closed, but a glance at the sun told him it was after nine. They’d been hiking for almost five hours. “What in the world is going on?” he asked. He dropped the line and went back to the girl on the tent. Rob was right about the wear on the canvas. Conner could see where it was tearing. He pulled his canteen out of his pack and knelt by the girl to give her more water.

“Is it a special Sunday?” Rob asked.

“Not that I know of.” Conner poured a capful there in the shade of the doctor’s office. “Bang on the door,” he said.

His brother did. A woman with a load balanced on her head hurried past. “Hey,” Conner called to her.

She slowed. The load wobbled as she turned her head.

“You know if Doc is out on a call?”

The lady looked at them both like they were from the northern wastes. She gave the girl lying still on the folded canvas a brief glance. “Probably out looking for Danvar,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Danvar?” Conner asked, quite certain he’d heard wrong.

The lady didn’t dare nod. “They found it,” she said. “Half the town’s out there now. The other half is scrambling for their coin. I’ve gotta go.”

She and her load turned and headed off.

“Wait!” Conner called out. “This girl needs help!”

“Good luck,” the lady called.

Conner turned and beseeched the next couple who hurried past, two men with dive tanks on their backs who made a concerted effort not to look his way, not to even glance at him for fear of the guilt they might suffer. Rob looked like he was on the verge of tears. The cap of water disappeared into the girl’s mouth, but she didn’t swallow. Conner tried to feel for a pulse, but he didn’t really know how. Maybe that was his own pulse in his thumb he was sensing.

“What the hell?” he asked. He studied his hands, which were raw from the haul. His legs ached from the long hike with the weight of the girl and the tent. There were doctors deeper into Springston he couldn’t afford, but he could tell them what the girl promised. What she might mean. Or he could go door to door in Shantytown and beg for help. Hope someone might know more to do than give her water and clean the sand out of her wounds.

“What about Mother?” Rob asked.

Conner’s hands shook as he twisted the cap back onto the canteen. He peered up at his brother, who had tears streaking down both cheeks. It was the worst idea either of them could possibly have. But it was also likely that their mother was the only person who would take the girl in, who might know what to do for her.

“Goddamn you,” Conner told his brother. He cursed him for being right.

39 • A Rose on the Pillow

The leak in the pipes had not been fixed like the plumber said. Rose could see that the brown stain had spread across the white painted ceiling, had grown. It was a stain within a stain within a stain, three concentric brown patches of varying hue, one patch each for the three times the plumber had ripped her off, one patch each for the three times the plumbing to the upstairs basins had leaked precious water. Drip, drip, drip goes the coin.

The crack up there was getting worse as well. Widening. A zig at the end that used to be a zag, moving its way back and forth across that warped surface. The sands were shifting, the walls twisting, a house out of shape.

And the springs. The springs of the bed needed oiling. They sounded like the mad call of some crazed bird, some animal that chirped over and over, waiting for a response, for some hint of life, for awareness from some other, but only getting a rhythmic silence. A pause for every squeak. Week, week, week, week. Years piling up.

Her husband had brought her the bed triumphantly, had raised it from nearly four hundred meters, or so he’d bragged. And it was heavy. She could attest to that. Rose had moved it with a friend when the palace had fallen. It was all she had left in the world: the bed, that dresser, this brothel. It was fitting how her husband had left her prepared for her new life. Other men concerned themselves with getting their family up on their feet. Rose had fallen for a man who had left her on her back.

“How was that for you?” the man asked. He had evidently finished. Was now looking down at her expectantly, sweat dripping from his nose to splash between her breasts. His arms—muscled but layered with fat—trembled. There was more hair on his shoulders than his head, and his beard was full of sand.

“Oh, you’re the best,” Rose told him.

“Ah, you’re just saying that.” He grunted and fell to the side, a flock of startled springs chirping.

“I’m not,” Rose said. “You know you’re my favorite.” She prayed to the gods he wouldn’t ask her what his name was. Please, please, please don’t ask. They always wanted to hear it, to make it personal, to own more than just her time. But he didn’t ask. Worse: he started snoring.

Rose groaned and moved gingerly to the washbasin. She pulled the sewn intestine out from between her legs and washed it in the shallow puddle of water. The milky swimmers swirled on the surface with the others before slowly settling to the bottom. Rose draped the intestine over the lip of the basin with two others to dry. With a towel, she wiped off what had leaked out and had dribbled down her inner thigh to her knee. She dressed while the man snored. She would charge him rent for the bed if he stayed more than an hour. Serve him right.

Leaving the room, she stood on the narrow balcony walkway that circled the inside of the Honey Hole. It was dead quiet below, early in the morning, but the remnants of a noisy evening were scattered everywhere. Drunks sleeping on the floor, curled around barstool legs like lovers. Spent as much time on them as on any woman, Rose thought. A card game had been abandoned, the pot and players missing but the empty jars and cans and glasses standing in a crowd around the discard pile and folded hands. There were two puddles in the middle of the floor to clean up—piss or spilled beer. Idiots wasting their coin on fluids they couldn’t get in them, or on fluids that would pass right through.

Another of the doors opened down the catwalk—or the Esplanade of Pussy, as one of her regulars called it. Doria stood in her doorway and suffered a deep kiss goodbye, and then her client waddled down the stairs toward the bar, fumbling with the laces on his fly as he went.

Doria and Rose exchanged weary and knowing glances. They peered over the railing at all that needed cleaning before happy hour that night. Weekend hell. No sleep for the dreary.

Rose tried to remember a time before this routine. She felt like a speck of sand in an alien land, confused as to how it had gotten there. Carried on the wind from one dune to the next, each getting her closer to a destination she never would’ve chosen if there had been some way to make the wind listen.

There was no one behind the bar. Off to a piss or gone home. That bar had been the first dune, Rose thought. She remembered standing there, drying empty jars, letting the men leer before they went up to give one of her girls five minutes of displeasure. That was the first dune. And it led to all the others. A woman not for sale until the Honey Hole was. But no takers for the latter. Only a few years from being duned over, they said. The books didn’t shine too bright, they said. Not enough coin in it, they said. Can’t mix business with pleasure, they laughed.

Rose had come dangerously close to simply walking away. The only thing that stopped her was not wanting to be like her husband. He had taken even this luxury away from her. Had made her so angry at his abandonment that running away had become a power removed. And so she was trapped.

The door to her prison opened with a squeak, letting some light in. It was her children, Conner and Rob. Just the sort of hour at which she would expect them to burst in, needing something, palms open. She nearly yelled at them, let the mood her client had put her in rain down on their heads, but then she saw what Conner was carrying. Not this. She didn’t need this. She rushed down the stairs to send them away, to tell them to find a damn doctor, not to bring their mistakes to her. But Conner’s mouth opened before hers could—and out spilled the impossible.

40 • Ticking Bombs

Vic emerged from the moist and heavy sand and took great gulps of glorious air. She rested as long as she dared, the sun beating down on her, before joining her brother in the shade of the sarfer’s hull. Palmer had been watching her with obvious relief, a grimace-like smile on his face. But as she handed him her canteen, which sloshed now with spring water, Palmer seemed to catch sight of his blurry reflection in the shiny metal. His pained smile melted into a pained frown. He reached up to touch his cheek.

“I don’t look so good,” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes as Vic took the canteen back from him and worked the cap off. Palmer met her gaze. He reached to his swollen lips. “How do I look?”

“You look like someone who should be dead but isn’t. It’s a good look.”

“I feel like a blister that’s about to pop.”

“Yeah, I was going to say that.”

They shared something like laughter, and Vic handed him the open canteen. Palmer took a sip, his cheeks billowing and contracting as he swished the water around. He labored to swallow. “You were gone so long…”

“Sorry. Not much of a spring here. Had to go down quite a ways to fill the canteens. There’s grit in there, so don’t tip it too much—”

“It’s okay. I could eat a dune.” Palmer’s hands shook as he lifted the canteen to his lips again.

Vic helped him steady the vessel. While he worked the water down, she took a small sip from Marco’s canteen, her lips pressed where her lover’s once had. “We’ll get you some food in town,” she said, trying to think on other things. “But we should probably stay here the night.”

Her brother looked past her toward the horizon. “Are we safe? No one followed us here?”

Vic smoothed the hair off his forehead. She remembered Palmer when he was much younger. He seemed much younger right then. Her brother was terrified. “What happened?” she asked. She had yet to ask him about the dive or the discovery, about the people looking for him in Springston. She had been too worried about losing him, too concerned about finding water and food and nursing him back to health.

Her brother took another swig from the canteen, his blistered hands shaking. He dabbed gently at his cracked lips with the sleeve of his dive suit. Winced. Stared up at the bands of sand swirling on the wind.

“They were never going to let us go,” he said. “We were there to find Danvar and then to die.”

“But you did find it.”

Palmer nodded. “Five hundred meters down.”

“No,” Vic said. She situated herself against the hull of the sarfer, blocking the wind for Palmer. “You didn’t go that deep.”

“They’d made a pit and a hole, had the first two hundred clear for us. I don’t know how. Hundreds of dive suits wired up together. It was amazing. And the scrapers down there, Vic. You should see them. Hundreds of meters tall. We hit the tops of the largest of them at five hundred. Was another five hundred or so to the street.”

Palmer must’ve seen the look of disbelief on her face. “They’d dug a pit,” he said. “Did I mention that? But we were down three hundred true. Maybe close to three-fifty.”

“You went down three hundred meters,” Vic said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“You can but I can’t?”

She didn’t have an answer for that. Not without sounding like their mother. “Was it untouched?”

Something flashed across her brother’s face. “Not quite,” he said. “Two other divers had gone down before us, but they didn’t make it back.”

“So you were the first to get down and back up? You discovered Danvar.” Vic heard the awe and disbelief in her own voice.

Palmer looked away. “Hap made it back before me. And Hap saw it first. He’s the one.”

“But you said Hap was dead—”

Her brother reached up and patted his forehead as if looking for something. “My visor,” he said. “They got both our visors.” He seemed to deflate even further with this, seemed to sink down within that too-big dive suit, like the last juice of life had been squeezed from him.

“Do you think you could find Danvar again?” Vic asked.

Palmer hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. If we found their camp, or the remnants of their fire, then maybe. But without the hole they made, it’d be too deep to reach those buildings again.”

“I could get down there,” she told him.

Her brother searched her face, almost as if seeing if she was kidding.

“Do you know how they found it?” she asked. “How did they know to dig there?”

Conner nodded up toward the sky. “The stars,” he said. “Colorado’s belt. They had a map that showed Low-Pub and Springston and another town in a line, just like the constellation. The third star was Danvar. They knew where it was.”

“A map…”

Her brother flinched. A jolt of life and energy. He patted excitedly at his stomach, fumbled for the zipper on his pouch, and out spilled coin after coin—

“Shit,” Vic said, plucking one out of the sand. It was a copper. Untarnished. Beautiful. Thirty or more pieces spilled out and were quickly covered by the rush.[12] Her brother seemed uninterested in these as she gathered them up. He pulled out a folded piece of paper.

“A map,” he said. The paper trembled as he struggled to get it unfolded. Vic helped. She took over. It was a large sheet. It popped in the wind, sand collecting in the folds with a hiss and sliding down into her lap. Vic had seen corners and scraps of maps like this, paper rotted by the sand, by time, by moisture, by being passed from hand to hand. But this was whole and untouched and a beauty to behold.

“You got their map,” Vic said. “Fuck, Palm, you got their map.”

“No. I found it in the scraper. It was with the coin.”

Vic bent over to protect the paper from the wind. She folded the map in half and then in half again, had to wrestle with the creases, was worried she or the wind might rip it. There were lines and place-names and numbers everywhere. Every scrap of a map she’d ever seen or heard about could fit together and not equal even a fraction of this massive, undisturbed sheet.

“Do you know what this means?” Vic studied the square she’d left exposed after her folds. There was a bright yellow collection of squiggles with the word Pueblo written above. But it was a series of rectangles that had caught her eye and had drawn her attention to this part of the map. It was the crooked letter Y the rectangles made at one point, the other part like the letter H. There was a curved structure that stood along the side of them, which she knew had once been covered with a tent but now was full of sand.

“Puh…Eh…Blow. Enter…National. Air…Port.” She sounded it out, stumbling over the words, reading them phonetically. She traced her finger from the collection of long rectangles that she had seen in her own visor, that she knew as cracked concrete slabs beneath the sand, to where she knew the ruins of Low-Pub lay. It was the same place. No doubting it.

“What is that?” Palmer asked. His eyes were wide. “Can you read it?”

“I know this place. I’ve been here. This is Old Low-Pub, the buried ruins just west of town. Fuck, Palm, this is a gold mine.”

“Old Low-Pub is picked over to hell and back,” Palmer reminded her.

“I know. But this is a map of the old world. This thing is ancient. And if it’s to scale—” She held three fingers together and placed them between Low-Pub and the dive site where she’d been picking over a cache of bags for months. Flipping the map around, she refolded it to reveal something else. She measured her way north three fingers at a time. There was an even larger squiggle of lines and place-names right where she expected them to be. “Colorado Springs,” she said. She felt a chill, reading these words, realizing it was Springston. Visors were suddenly pulled down over her eyes that allowed her to see through all the sand that choked the old world. She was a god watching from on high. “This is Twin Rock Path,” she said. She showed her brother the dark set of double lines that ran between Low-Pub and Springston. It was the path their great-grandfather had followed in order to discover Low-Pub. Or so legend had it.

“Enter…State…Twenty-five,” Palmer sounded out. “The path has a number.” He tried to sit up to see better.

“There are a thousand dive sites here,” Vic said. She felt dizzy, looking at the map. Dizzy and excited. The danger her brother was in dimmed for a moment. But only a moment.

“The people who want me dead,” Palmer said. “I don’t… I don’t think they were looking for Danvar to scavenge, Vic. I’m not even sure it was Danvar they were after.”

She tore her eyes away from the map. “Then why would they have you dive down there to find it?”

Palmer situated himself against the hull of the sarfer. He stared out over that dark, damp patch of sand. “When I got back up, the pit they had dug was already filling back in. And they’d broken down a few of their tents, like locating the old city was all they were after. Like they were moving on. And there was a party that came back, that had gone somewhere. They returned the night I was there, looking for water. They’d gone off to find something.”

Vic didn’t understand. But she didn’t interrupt. Her brother was reasoning something out.

“I remember them saying something about us needing to be precise. They just wanted us to locate those scrapers, down to the last meter. I think they were using their map the way you’re talking about, to find other dive sites. That’s how they knew where to look for Danvar. They were homing in on some other spot. Getting it down precise so they’d know where to dig.”

“What makes you say that?” Vic asked.

Her brother turned to her. “Because they found whatever it was they were looking for. I think it was a bomb. I went into one of the tents, looking for water and food. There was a crate of smaller bombs. And then I hid and I heard them talking about this one device—I saw it, a strange-looking thing—and they said this one bomb could level all of Low-Pub. And I believe them. They were serious. Organized. They laughed about leaving the desert flat. I think they mean to do it.”

Vic studied her brother. She glanced at the map. “When?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s been three days. They saw me under the table. They probably assume I heard everything. I remember them saying they were going to hit Springston first.”

“Maybe they’ll change their plans because you heard them,” Vic said. “Maybe they’ll call it off.” She was trying to be hopeful.

“Or they’ll do it sooner. Vic, we’ve gotta get to Springston. We’ve gotta get Conner and Rob out of there. We’ve gotta warn everyone.”

“There are people in Springston who want us dead,” she reminded him.

“Brock and his men are heading to Springston, and they want everyone dead,” Palmer said.

The words stung like a gust of sand. Vic shook her canteen and listened to the contents splash around. Her brother looked away from her and toward the sky where crows circled and the tops of dunes blew in gray sheets. She knew her brother was right. She folded away the map of a thousand undiscovered treasures and slipped it into her pocket. She knew he was right and that they had to go back to Springston. And she didn’t like it.

41 • A Smuggled Tale

There was the sting of a wolf biting her lips. A nightmare of burning desert sand and freezing windy nights and a pack of wild beasts tearing at her flesh—all broken by a splash of water against her mouth. And the young girl awoke in a strange room.

There was a woman above her. A bed. The young girl was lying on a bed beneath sheets as clean and white as a child’s teeth. Her dive suit and her britches were gone, just a shirt like a man wears folded across her and cinched with a white ribbon—sweet-smelling and clean. She moved to touch the shirt, and her side screamed out where she’d been bit.

“Lie still,” the woman said. She placed a hand on the young girl’s shoulder and forced her back against the pillows. There were two boys in the room. They were the boys from one of her dreams. “Can you take another small sip?” the woman asked.

The young girl nodded, and a jar was brought forward, the water inside as clear as glass. She lifted her hands to help, but they were bandaged and useless. The water burned her mouth in the best way.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Violet,” she said. Her voice was small in that strange room.

The woman smiled at this. “Like the flower.”

The older of the two boys moved closer to the bed, and Violet remembered his face from her dream, but it wasn’t a dream. Conner. He had picked her up and carried her. She knew where she was, that this was real. She turned to the woman with the water, who was asking about her name.

“Father said violet was the color he saw when I was born, that it was like seeing the air from beneath the sand. That’s why he named me Violet.”

The woman smoothed the hair back from the girl’s forehead and frowned like this was the wrong answer.

“Can I have more water?” she whispered. Her mouth was so dry.

“Just a little,” the woman said. “It’s possible to drink too much.”

Violet nodded. “You can drown,” she said. “Like in the river. Or what happens if you drink the bad water from the trough.” She lifted her head and took another sip. The younger of the two boys stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her. She knew who this was. “You’re Rob,” she said.

The boy startled as if someone had stomped on his foot. Regaining his composure, he bobbed his head.

“Father said we were about the same age.”

“Then he wasted no time,” the woman with the jar of water muttered. She sounded upset. “Where is he now? How far away is your village?”

“How did you get across No Man’s Land?” the older boy asked.

“How old are you?” Rob wanted to know.

The woman snapped her fingers at the two boys, and they seemed to know this meant not to talk. And something occurred to Violet. “You’re my second mom,” she said. “You’re Rose.”

The woman’s cheeks twitched at this. She shook her head and opened her mouth to say something—Violet thought maybe to say that she wasn’t her mom—but instead she just wiped at one eye and kept quiet. The two boys seemed to be waiting for Violet to answer all their questions, but she had already forgotten most of them.

“I don’t come from a village,” she said. She rested her head on the pillow and gazed longingly at the jar of water in the woman’s hands. “I came from a camp. It doesn’t have a name, just a number, and we aren’t allowed to leave. There are tents and fences, and we can see the city from the camp. Kids from the city come to the fence—there’s two fences, so if you get through one the other will stop you—and some of the kids from the city throw candy through the fence and some throw rocks—it’s usually the bigger kids with the rocks, which means the rocks come harder than the candy, but we’re told to stay away from the fence anyway—”

“What kind of camp is this?” Rose asked.

“Like camping in a tent—?” Rob said, but he got snapped at again.

“A mining camp,” Violet said. “It’s where they blow up the ground and grab the worthy stuff out with their nets. That’s what the foreman calls them, but Father says they aren’t really nets. They have magnets in them. He knows all about wires and magic and stuff. They make us work the troughs for the heavier bits that drift to the bottom. We work with water up to our elbows all day, cold water. It makes your hands and fingers shrivel. People in the camp who come from the south call it the pruning flesh—”

“Water up to your elbows,” Conner scoffed. “And where’s all this water come from?”

It was clear he didn’t believe her. Father warned Violet this would happen, that no one would believe. “The water comes from the river,” she said. “But you can’t drink it. Some do, and they die. Because of the metals and the mining. The water for drinking comes from way upstream, past all the camps, but they don’t give us much of that. Father says they starve our mouths and drown our arms just to drive us mad. But it didn’t make me mad. Just thirsty.”

Saying this won her another sip from the jar. Violet felt better. It was the sheets and the roof over her head and the jar of water and people to talk to.

“What’s the name of this city?” Rose asked. “Where’s my husband?”

“The city is called Agyl. The people outside the fence call it that, but they talk funny, and Father says I talk too much like them because I was born in the camp. They say it’s a small city, but Father says it’s bigger than where he comes from. I don’t know. It’s the only city I’ve ever seen. Just a mining town. The big cities, they say, are more to the sunrise, all the way to the sea. But that’s—”

“What’s a sea?” Rob asked.

More snapping.

“Tell me about the people in this camp,” Rose said. “How many are there? Where did they come from?”

Violet took a deep breath. She eyed the water. “There are hundreds,” she said. “Five hundreds? More. Most come from the sunset like Father. Some get there by doing something wrong in the cities. A few of these get let out after so long of working, but more are always let in. Our camp had a big number for a name, which Father said must mean there are lots of them. There are people in our camp who came from the north or the south and are already hungry like us. The ones who come from the sunset don’t get let go. Not ever. They have fences and towers where they watch for them and nets to put them in.”

“How is… your father?” Rose asked. Her voice sounded funny. Violet eyed the jar.

“Is it okay to have more water now? It’s been a while.”

Rose let her take a small sip. It reminded Violet of her father, getting a ration like this, and she started crying. She wiped the tears off her cheek with the back of her wrist and drank them too. “Father said you’d ask how he was and to say that he was okay, but Father doesn’t always tell the truth.”

This made Rose laugh, but then she covered her mouth and was crying, too. The boys were quiet without being snapped at. Violet thought of what she wanted to say, some of what she was told to say with some truth mixed in as well.

“They don’t feed us enough,” she said. “That’s what the adults say. And so people come in with muscles and then it goes away. Sometimes the people go away all at once. That’s when their sheets are pulled up over their heads. I always tucked my chin down like this—” She lowered her chin against her chest and pretended to hold sheets tight up against her neck. “—so it wouldn’t happen to me. Father was stronger than most of the men there. Tall. With dark eyes and dark skin like the men from the sunset and dark hair like yours.” She nodded to Conner. “But I could lay a finger between his ribs while he slept, and his ribs would go out and in, and he gave me too much of his bread.”

Violet thought on what else she needed to say. There was a lot. So much that her thoughts were getting jammed like the trough sometimes did when too much metals came.

“Did he tell us how to get to him?” Conner asked. “What did he say we should do?”

There was no snapping for quiet. Her second mom wiped her cheeks and waited for an answer.

“He wrote a note—” Violet said.

“A note from Father?” Rob asked.

“Where is it?” Conner wanted to know.

“It was in my suit, against my skin. I think I lost it with my pack. Father told me not to read it…” She hesitated.

“It’s okay,” Rose said. Her second mom reminded Violet a lot of her first one.

“I read part of it while he was writing it. He made me promise not to read any more. The part I read said not to come for him, to look west over the mountains, and then a confusing part about the sand in the wind and how it comes from the mining they do, that the wind also comes from something bad… something with the lands. I’m sorry. I’m trying to remember…”

“You’re doing a great job,” Rose said. She smiled, but there was still water in her eyes.

“Father used to tell me that it doesn’t rain where he comes from. He said the dirt the mining men throw up in the air for the magnets makes the clouds release their water into the cavern, and that’s where the river comes from, and that all the rain meant for his people is taken out of the air by the sand.” She licked her lips. Again, the sting of a wolf’s bite. “He used to get really mad and talk about this and watch through the fence as the sun went down. There was always the loud booms out that way that made my ears hurt and blocked the sky up so everything was a haze, but he spent all his time on that side. The sunset people were the only ones who liked it over there. Father wanted me to stay close, but I’d rather pray for candy and not rocks by the other fence.”

“How did you get out?” Conner asked. And Rob nodded. Rose said nothing to quiet the boys, so Violet figured it was okay to answer.

“Father gathered stuff. For as long as I can remember, maybe before I was born. Years and years. He said he was going to get us out, just the three of us, and then Mother died when I was six, and he said it would be me and him. He kept stuff in the sand, said it was silly none of the guards looked there, that people would know better where he was from. Bits of wire, a rubber raincoat, batteries, a drill someone left behind because the motor wouldn’t work—but Father knew how to fix it. He spent the better part of a year getting a tool for melting wire. It was all so slow. I wanted him to hurry. And then I could place two fingers down between his ribs while he slept and his breathing sounded like he needed to cough all the time, but he said he was going to get us out.

“And then he showed me what he was making, made me swear not to tell any of the sunset people, and I had to wear it under my clothes so it wouldn’t be found. He would have me take it off at night so he could work on it, adjust the wires so they didn’t scratch me, and then he showed me how—”

“He made a dive suit,” Conner said.

Violet nodded. Rose held the jar to Violet’s lips, and she took two swallows. She felt selfish after this and dabbed her lips with her bandaged hand.

“There’s a big crack in the ground,” she said. “This is where the muddy river is, where the sand is thrown into the sky and the metals are got out. Bigger than a hundred leaps across and it got bigger and bigger every year. Father said I would have to go under this, that I would have to hold my breath a long time, that it was the only way out. He made me hold my breath while I worked the trough, made me do it over and over, could tell when I was using my nose. I practiced until I could do it for long enough.

“I learned to move the sand, and one day I wanted to show him how good I was getting, so I went under the fence and came up the other side toward the city, but he got madder than I’ve ever seen him and told me never to go that way, that I’d only end up back here and then they’d know what we could do and everything would be worse. I had to go west, he told me, and I had to tell his people to keep going west. That’s what he said. There had been a family in the camp when I was too little to remember who shared a story about a sea even past where the sun went at night, where the water wasn’t muddy. It never rained there, but there was water as far as you could see.”

Conner grunted at this. Violet remembered how the sunset people in the mining camp hadn’t believed this story, either. But her father had. And Violet, too.

“He said we shouldn’t come for him,” Rose said, almost to herself.

Violet nodded. “There were fights in camp. Some of the people from the city said there were too many of us, more and more coming all the time, that we were making their life bad. But our life felt bad. Father said I had to get out, that I was young and strong and that I could make it. He made me dive at night when everyone was asleep. And for months and months, he drank half rations and filled bladders with the other halves. He caught rats and made jerky. Said it kept him going, all these things. Said it was good to stay busy. Said he never should’ve come there, never left his people, but that I would make it okay because I would come back and tell about the world that doesn’t care for us.”

“And you’re a sand diver,” Rob said, his voice full of awe, as Violet paused to catch her breath. All the nights of hiking and thinking and being alone made her want to say everything all at once.

“The diving was easy,” she said. “The walking was the hard part. It was twelve days of walking. It took Father nine, but he said it would take me twelve, that I would have to count and time it right. It was very important, the day I left. Which day. He drew a picture of the mountains and showed me which was the Pike and that I would keep this just left of my nose and the star to the north directly over my right shoulder, and on the twelfth day I would see smoke and on the twelfth night I would see fire, right past a crack in the ground that he said I could leap over at the narrowest—”

“He knew we’d be camping,” Conner said.

Violet nodded. “He said if I missed the fire I would come to a big wall and a small town, but that if I found the smoke and the fire that I would be home right then. And I was doing good, walking at night and sleeping all day and being careful with my water. Until a wolf came—”

“A wolf?” Rob asked.

“You… you call them cayotes, I think. In camp, they had different names for things, talked a whole other language. I grew up with both, so I forget which goes where. Dad used to say my accent was like theirs. The cayote came for the last of my jerky while I slept on the ninth night. I should’ve just let him have it, but I was scared and so I fought back, and he ripped me good, tore open my pack, and I ran. My last bladder was torn and all the water spilled out, and I ran all day thinking the… cayote would come for me, but it didn’t. I was real tired and thirsty after that, and I had two days more to find the crack in the ground, and my knees were messed up and my stomach hurt real bad, so I went and went all day and night and then on the twelfth day, I was falling asleep while walking and I would wake up on the sand, and the sun would be hot, and I had bad dreams, and my hands and knees were burning, but then I saw the smoke like Father said, and the night came and I saw the fire, and then I had a dream that you were there.”

She looked at Conner. Took deep breaths. Realized she was winded, that she’d been talking and talking. But there was another sip from the jar for her efforts, and when her second mom Rose wiped the hair off her head and tucked it behind her ears, it was with a different look on her face. Her hand stayed on Violet’s shoulder. Everyone else in the room was looking at her with wrinkles of worry, but Violet just rested against the pillows and enjoyed the feel of the sheets and the grumble of her belly around the water. She wasn’t worried. She had made it. Just like Father said she would.

42 • The Letter

Rose left the young girl to rest in a bed too rarely slept in. She made Conner and Rob leave her in peace and pester her with no more questions. Poor Rob had to be dragged away. Both boys had spent the previous day and all night orbiting that bed, waiting for the girl to recover, to come to, to say something. Now they sat downstairs around a table in the slowly emptying bar and slurped greedily at bowls of leftover stew. Rose watched them eat over the balcony rail, her mind in all places at once.

Down the balcony and through a door, Rose could hear a drunk’s labored grunts. Valerie’s room. That such baseness could occur alongside events of staggering significance was like a joke from the gods. Rose fought the urge to bash Valerie’s door down and slap the drunk off her, to yell at them both, to shut it down, all of it down, not just the Honey Hole but the entire exercise of going through the motions, living life, being there among those dunes. If what the girl said was true—that the elsewhere her husband had disappeared into was worse than this place—then the dream of so many for an easy escape was really just another hell beyond their reckoning.

Rose leaned over the rail, wondering what was taking Diana so long. She caught Conner staring up at her. Rob looked up as well. They were just boys. Just boys. But they possessed something like protective ownership of the girl. Conner had even referred to Violet as his sister, after she’d fallen back to sleep. Another sister, this girl who would cause a storm. Yes, her story would lead to chaos once it was out. News of Danvar was nothing. The sands would not sit still for this.

Hard to believe it was only the day before that the boys had arrived with the girl in their arms. Rose had nearly turned them away. She had very nearly refused them when they showed. She did plenty of patching after the occasional brawl, and was the one her girls came to after one of their clients got too rough, but she didn’t want it known that just anyone could be brought in with wounds from elsewhere. Then Conner had explained just how far elsewhere, had said this girl came from No Man’s Land, and that she had a message from their father.

Half of such a sentence as this could fry a woman’s brain. The whole had taken over her limbs. Rose barely remembered carrying the child up the stairs and to her room. She barely remembered cutting the foul clothes from her, getting the sand out of her cuts, sewing her up like a pair of torn stockings. It was as though she’d watched another’s hands apply a salve and pour water between the girl’s lips. Someone else had yelled at her ten o’clock to come back later. No, that was her. She remembered that. And she remembered telling Diana to get rid of the clothes, which were little more than bloody rags with bits of wire in them.

Now she found herself asking Diana to track those same scraps down, to get them out of the trash. Rose wanted to know more. She was torn between letting the girl rest and assailing her with questions. What of this distant city? What of this camp? What would her husband of old do if their roles were reversed? She tried to think like her husband the Lord, not the desperate and crazed man who had sent a girl to warn his people away. Not him, but the younger man who had once brought other Lords to their knees. The man she’d never told her children about. Would this man run and hide? She didn’t think so. And yet, he was asking them to.

And Rose had a terrible thought. What if her husband was still the same man, and he knew in his battle-scarred wisdom that running was the only option? What if he knew that now was the time for laying low, for giving in, for sliding deep beneath the sand? Rose wiped angrily at her cheek, damning him as was her daily ritual.

“I think this is all of it.”

She turned to find Diana beside her, holding tightly to a bundle of scraps tied up in one of the towels from the kitchen. Rose hadn’t even seen her climb the stairs.

“Good, good. Thanks.” Rose took the bundle.

Diana glanced at the door. “Is she… ? Is that girl okay?”

“She’ll be fine.”

“Another attack? Looked like a bomb, maybe, the way her clothes were shredded.”

“No. Something else. Keep an eye on my boys for me. And no appointments for the rest of the day.”

Diana frowned, but Rose didn’t care to explain. She let herself into her room and shut the door.

The girl was still sleeping. She held the edge of her sheet with her bandaged hands and kept it up against her neck, chin tucked down. Here was another miserable life her husband had made. Another life ruined, no doubt, in the name of love.

Rose set the bundle on the small table by the window where there was light. She untied the towel and began sorting through the scraps. Her stomach twisted up in knots at the sight of blood on the girl’s pants and her dive suit. The rubbery material of the dive suit felt strange—not quite like any fabric Rose had ever seen. It was like the girl’s strange accent, with words understandable but the sound not quite right. Everything about the girl was both alien and familiar.

Rose had to be careful not to prick herself on the torn bits of wire as she sorted through the scraps. As a dive suit, the outfit was ruined. But she found the belly of the suit and the pouch there that no diver would be without. Rose turned the large scrap of material into the light. She ran her fingers across stitches her husband had made. And there across them was a neat snip her scissors had left from cutting the material off the girl. Fumbling to open the pouch, her fingers shaking, hoping against hope, Rose felt the folded piece of paper inside.

She pulled out the letter. Unfolded it, hands trembling, not daring to breathe.

The sight of her husband’s handwriting blurred the words he’d written:

Rose,

I hope this message finds you well. I have forfeited the right to ask anything of you, but I trust the messenger will be cared for. All that awaited her here was misery and death. I don’t have much time left, and so I send her and these words to the gods. I pray I don’t write them in vain.

You alone know all the bad I’ve done. Running from my mistakes was by far the worst. There is a reason no one comes back from this place. They won’t let us. Don’t come for me. Run from these drums, Rose. They grind the earth to nothing here. They take our water from the sky. Mountains are turned into rivers. There is no talking to them, even those of us who have learned their language. We are the salamander living in a hole beneath the sand. They are the boot that unwittingly buries us. To them, it is just a march onward and onward. To us, it is a trampling.

They know you are out there. They know of Springston and Low-Pub. Others before me have told them, have begged to be released, have begged for help, for water, for any of the small miracles we glimpse of their cities and their life. But no help will ever come for us. Our voices will never be heard. They have lesser problems to worry over.

Listen to me, please. This is not a war to win. It’s not one to even fight. Don’t let the young there among you know what we’re up against. You remember how I was. Tell only the old and wise, those with burns and scars, that everything here is to be feared. Tell the Lords. Explain to them that these people are not evil, which we might understand and combat. Explain to them that these people do not care and cannot be made to, which is far worse. There can be no knocking on their doors that they might hear. Nothing we can do or say that will be as loud as the blasts that rob our rain. We are the salamander, they are the boot. You have to make the Lords understand.

Go west if you can. Forget the horror stories of what lies that way. Forget the mountains. Crush their peaks if you must, but go. Take the children and whoever will listen to reason. Those who will not succumb to reason, leave them behind to rot. Leave them here with me where we belong.

Yours,

Farren Robertson Axelrod — The Pickpocket of Low-Pub

Rose ran her fingers across her husband’s name. She could feel the graceful groove the press of his pen had made. A man she thought dead had written this. She sat there for a long time with that letter in her hands, gazing upon the words, while a young girl lay in the bed beside her, murmuring in her dreams.

Rose remembered a time and a life when things had been different. She read the letter again, hearing the voice of her husband reading it to her, remembering his smell, his touch, the itch of his beard against her neck, the way a man could lie with her and she would want it to last, not end as quickly as possible. Love she would give anything for.

There was no telling how long she sat like this, there in that feeble shaft of light dumping through sand-dusted glass. The sand hissed on the panes. It came in waves with the wind. Her daydreaming of the long ago brought with it more than the sound of Farren’s voice. It brought the thunder of drums, which she used to hear from the great wall. Drums like a heartbeat out of rhythm.

The empty water jar on the table shuddered, which snapped Rose back to the present. The drums were real. She could still hear them popping—that unmistakable dull roar of buried bombs being triggered. But too many. She lost count. Rose leaned over the table and banged on the window with her fist, loosening the cake[13] so she could see. There was a noise outside her door, the sound of boots hurrying up the stairs and across the balcony. This was soon muffled by a growing grumble beyond her window, a thunderous din that grew and grew. There was noise everywhere. The door to her room flew open. Rose turned and saw Conner there, Rob standing behind him, both boys winded, eyes wide, looking to the bed and then to the window.

“Mom?”

Rose turned as the sound grew deafening. She peered through the glass toward Springston. The letter trembled in her hands. The jar wobbled as the violence approached.

“No,” she muttered, realizing what was coming, what was happening. The room shook. The Honey Hole quivered. The young girl woke suddenly and began screaming, and Rose yelled at her boys to take a deep breath, to get down. She dove from the window and threw herself across the girl.

And then the sand bashed through the window and buried them all.

43 • The Great Wall

Vic and Palmer spent a night at the oasis. Palmer needed time to regain some strength before another day of sailing, and Vic wasn’t comfortable navigating the dunes at night. They left at first light in a building breeze. She stopped twice to check on her brother and force him to drink. While she sailed, he rode along in the haul rack, a small bimini flapping above him, his head lolling side to side as he drifted off to sleep.

They arrived at Springston a little past noon, the sun just crossing the mast as Vic steered due south by compass. She took in the mainsheet and sailed the sarfer up and along a ridge of dunes toward the north side of town. Freeing the mainsail and furling the jib, she slowed the craft to a halt. The aluminum hull groaned on its rusty rivets as the pressure on the mast lessened, the sand crunching as the craft came to a rest. Vic set her teeth and rummaged through Marco’s gear bag—an unpleasant reminder of his absence. She always figured she’d lose him on a dive or in some retaliatory bombing, some nonsensical violence, an effort to depose one Lord and replace him with some identical other. She tried not to think of how it had happened. Or the click of that misfire aimed at her own skull. She found his binoculars in his bag and placed the strap around her neck. Today. Focus on the now.

“Why’re we stopping?” Palmer asked. He had propped himself up in the sarfer’s haul rack, Vic’s gear bag a pillow behind his head. The bimini Vic had rigged up to keep him in the shade made it difficult for him to see where they were.

“We’re stopping so I can get a look at town. Last time I was here, someone tried to kill me, and everyone is looking for you. We need food, and I’d like to get word to some friends to be on the lookout for Brock and his men. I’m hoping I can do both at the market on the edge of town here. If it looks too risky, we’re gonna push on to Low-Pub.”

Palmer groaned. “I don’t think I can go another dune in this rack, Vic.”

She unplugged her suit from the charger fed by the wind turbine and stood on the deck of the twin-hulled craft. She gave the boom a wary glance, made sure the wind wasn’t going to blow it toward her. “I know,” she said. “I’d rather not ride any farther myself. But I’d also prefer not to get killed, either.”

She pulled her goggles off, wiped the gunk from the corners of her eyes, and lifted the binoculars to study the lay of the land. There were a few sarfers parked along the dunes between her and Springston, dive flags flapping high up their masts to warn territorially of activity below. Vic had parked a little west and just north of the line between town proper and the unofficial scattering of shacks known as Shantytown. The last place she’d lived out there had been pushed under a dune a while ago. The morning market on the north side looked like it had already shut—the tents had been broken down and hauled off. Probably from lack of activity. So many had scattered in search of Danvar. There used to be a grocer just beyond the market; Vic could always leave Palmer with the sarfer and go check. She had the coin he’d scavenged. She just needed to get in and out without drawing attention.

She scanned farther to the east. There was a sandscraper near the great wall that had been abandoned for its lean. That might be the safest place to spend the night if Palmer couldn’t take more travel. The vagrants there would know where to grab an emergency bite. If she got desperate enough, she could make her way beneath the sand and just steal something. Better risk a hanging than starve for sure. Amazing how quickly one could reach such a decision. If it were Marco there suggesting such a thing, she’d be the voice of morality, of caution. But Marco was gone and people wanted her brother dead. She supposed there was a different sort of morality that took precedence. A hierarchy. Life and liberty were the Lords of action, now.

Focusing past the tall scrapers, she surveyed the great wall. The leaning concrete face was still in shadow. Another way she knew that it was a touch past noon. Vic remembered watching a quiet sunrise from those ramparts when she was a child, remembered not worrying about her next meal or the next cap of water. She licked her chapped lips as she remembered baths, as she remembered braying goats that could be had for their meat as well as their milk and cheese. Her stomach begged her to remember no more.

She spotted people up on the wall, little black specks of privilege. She envied them that home, that fortress that protected bustling Springston. Here was one solution to the winds from the east; a different answer to the same problem could be seen in Shantytown. The problem in common was that the world was in flux. The sands were always shifting, always pushing from east to west. Progressing, as her father used to say. Always progressing from east to west.

Vic swung the binoculars across Shantytown, where the people moved with the dunes. Not a day went by without a house collapsing. And the rhythmic rattle of hammers there was as constant as the wind. Build and destroy. Destroy and build. People tunneled through the dunes as they closed in around their homes. Back doors became front doors. A doormat shaken out and relocated. Adapt and survive. Life goes on.

People died, of course. Houses collapsed in the middle of the night. Sand rushed through breached walls at any hour. A handful mourned. Hands slapped faces in grief. And then came the rhythmic rattle of hammers, building. The wail of a newborn, breathing.

Change in Shantytown was gradual and continuous. Dunes slid and moved and people adjusted around them. The change was backbreaking and exhausting, but it was a way of life. Each day was much the same as the last. The misery came in buckets, which could be handled. Time. The dunes. Society. The people. They all progressed, as her father would say.

Such were Vic’s distractions as she scanned the line between Shantytown and Springston, thinking on change and life rather than food, putting off how best to proceed. The high sun beat down on her. She could hear Palmer twisting the cap off his canteen, knew they were both getting low on water. Making a decision with his life in the balance made it difficult to be prudent and wise. She was used to risking only her own life. She preferred diving solo.

“What do you see?” Palmer asked from the haul rack.

“One stall near the market,” she said. “Might be our best bet.”

She focused the binoculars on the stall, which would have to be their oasis. They could sail over and park close by, get in and out, drop some coin and a warning about Brock’s men. She watched a family tend the stall, a woman sweeping sand into piles and two kids hauling it out to the dunes. Maybe she could meet the children there and pay them to bring the food out. She watched them work, not wanting to hurry any one plan, and her mind flitted back to these two ways of managing the dunes, Springston’s and Shantytown’s. Here was the perfect vantage for seeing how both worked. In Shantytown, the gradual battle with the sand spread misery across the generations. Evenly distributed. While in Springston, people lived protected from the wind, with flat desert and tall buildings rarely swamped by the dunes. Years of woe were stored up behind a teetering wall. That woe missed some generations entirely. It built and built.

And somehow, Vic knew what was happening before it did. Maybe she knew from her life with brigands, from all their plans and boasts, from living with Marco, from beginning to think like them. Or maybe it was the little black figures she spotted running along the ramparts as if something was wrong, chasing some people away. Or maybe the sound came first, and then her brain whirred with such ferocity, such speed, that all the thoughts came next in an eyeblink. It felt as if minutes passed, as if all she considered about the great wall and the coming ages of man flew by between the first deep thump deep in her chest and the subsequent signs of disaster.

Or maybe it was coincidence. A diver’s intuition. Palmer’s story about a crate of bombs taking out all of Springston, an old dream of insane schemers and revolutionaries who knew how to destroy but not create. Whatever the cause, her gaze was upon the great wall when it happened. And her mind was on the many falls of man.

Thoughts spun. She saw the ages counted by each collapse. Empires that came and went and that made up all of their history and lore. Their ends were both inevitable and unpredictable. The catastrophic nature of each grew bigger with time. No one thought an end would come in their lifetime. People glanced up at the towering wall of concrete and iron bars and reckoned their children or grandchildren would see it topple. It would be left to some distant generation to build the next wall, and to build it stronger. Bigger. Like each fall.

Meanwhile, on the back of the wall, the sand grew heavier and heavier. One grain at a time. Like a clock. Like the ticking clock on a bomb. Or a whole string of them—dozens of bombs like loaves of bread—buried along the base of the wall in the middle of the night, placed there by divers with a hellish bent, divers and pirates who had grown weary of that cool shadow that divides one world from the other, that harsh line between those who toil all day and those who can afford to wait.

Those who think they can afford to wait.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Sand and second hands. Vic watched from the top of the dune, from the deck of her dead lover’s sarfer, a sickness deep in the pit of her stomach, a powerful dread, all of this flashing through her mind as the dull thumps hit her in the chest.

The roars were muffled. They came like drums beat out of rhythm: boom… boom-boom… boom. Boom.

And then the teetering—the unholy teetering. A thing meant to last leaned its sad head. The body shuddered, losing its balance, feet knocked out from underneath. Vic covered her mouth and watched. Sand peppered the binoculars. Palmer yelled at her and asked what that was, his voice muffled by his ker.

The luckiest in life became the unluckiest. Those who lived nearest the wall were crushed. Those who lived inside it disappeared. These were the ones with the most to lose, and they lost everything. The sand they had let build for generations flooded down, finishing what the bombs had started. And a slab of concrete as high as many of the sandscrapers thudded impossibly flat.

The dune Vic stood on trembled. Sand flowed down the face of every dune in sight as gravity and the trembling of the world made them all lose an inch of height. Vic could feel the impact in the deck of the sarfer, in the soles of her feet. The rumble came moments later, a roar deep in her chest. And then a great wave of sand slid through Springston, a torrent of this unnatural dune finding its rightful level, flowing like water down on the sandscrapers and markets and square, buildings toppling as their knees were knocked out from under them, small black shapes spilling from the upper reaches, these people wrenched violently from their bequeathed homes.

Onward, the sand flowed. It spilled out to the side and caught Shantytown, those few unlucky enough to live along the edge of the shadows, where the summer solstice made the wall’s shadow more inclusive for a season. These went too. Only in the distance were they spared. The reckoning of the decades made good in a single moment. Shantytown the new Springston. And the Honey Hole, Vic saw, knocked aside at the far reach of the sand’s wake, right along that fuzzy line between town proper and town improper.

Her mother, buried. A town, lost. A small group of men, somewhere out there, cheering.

The wind stirred. The heavens themselves seemed to adjust to this new world. The sarfer’s boom creaked as the mainsail shifted. Palmer was yelling. Vic ignored him and jumped back into her seat. She grabbed the lines and pulled them taut. The jib unfurled with a mighty pop, and the sarfer lurched into motion. Vic sailed the craft dangerously down the side of the dune, fighting the tiller, her mind in splinters. She sailed for where she’d last seen the Honey Hole. She had vowed never to return to that place. Now, she couldn’t get there fast enough.

44 • Held Down, Violently

The sarfer raced across the dunes toward a field of debris where homes and shops had recently stood. Over the creaking mast and the taut and singing ropes, shouts for help and screams of horror could be heard. Screams from the past. Vic focused on a spot of sand at the edge of the destruction. There was a ridge of heaped tin and metal and wood blocking her path. She slewed the sarfer to a stop on the edge of town—was sixteen again as she jumped to the sand and raced between the dunes. Sixteen again and running half-naked across the desert floor. It’d been nighttime back then, and she’d been running away from the Honey Hole.

She had only gone inside for a drink. She and two friends. One drink had led to two drinks. She still had her wits about her, was able to tell the men no. She wasn’t laughing, not anymore. But the rooms were there, as was the expectation from those who had learned that anything they saw and wanted could be had for a price. A price. Cheap for them. Rent a room. C’mon, it’ll be fun. Firm hands. Friends egging her on.

Tears streaked down Vic’s face as she ran across the sand, remembering.

Two men. Laughing. Beer on their breaths. Strong arms from building and making. Strong arms for tearing and taking. Laughing. Her screams were funny to them. Her arms weak. But the way she squirmed made them roar. And Vic could hear her friends shouting through the walls, shouting now for them to stop, rattling locked doors, yelling at the people in another room, where similar horrors were more habit than happenstance.

Loose sand. Vic reached the end of intact houses, the extent of the onrush of that great dune. She ran past people gazing, people watching, people standing still, not helping, not hearing the muffled screams, the calloused hands over pretty mouths, the beer-breath lips crushing down, the feeling of sand piled on, of being buried alive, a pressure against new parts of her, the first time, crushing, crushing.

She hurried up the slope of sand until her legs were sore and would barely obey. She angled for where the Honey Hole used to sit. Vic pulled her band on, flipped her visor down, powered up her suit as she dove forward. She disappeared into the sand with barely a splash. Down where she was free and nothing could pin her.

Bright objects everywhere. The yellow and orange of great spoils, a scrounger’s paradise, so much worth saving. There were riches here carried all the way from the great wall. The rich were here as well. Vic saw a form trapped ahead of her, probably too late, but she formed a column of sand beneath the body and sent it to the surface. There were entire homes buried and flattened. There was debris everywhere to dodge. And ahead of her, right where she’d been running, was the three-story building she remembered, the house of nightmares, completely encased by the dune. No one would ever be harmed in that building again. They already had been. They already had been. The place was full of sand.

Vic slid through a busted window, hardening the sand around her to protect herself from the shards of glass. The walls inside were askew. The building had nearly buckled. It might have buckled were it not for the low concrete wall on the back side of the building to hold back the sand. Vic dialed her visor down to account for the loose pack inside the Honey Hole. Too bright in there. Bodies everywhere. Chairs and tables and the flash of glass jars and bottles. She raced up through the great hall and over the railing—or where the railing once stood. A purplish pocket of air along the third floor. The sand only got so high. Vic started to move who she could toward the air, but there wasn’t enough time. Not enough time. Even if the people there had gotten a lungful when it happened. Even if they had closed their mouths. Dead in minutes. Her mom was gone. Never got to say goodbye.

Vic saw the door to the room where it had happened all those years ago. The door was still whole, still solid, still closed on what took place in there. No one knew but those who had been inside. No one. Suffocating.

In her visor, her suit’s power glowed a bright green. A full charge. Ready for a deep dive, all that extra juice for holding the world at bay, for holding up that column of sand and air that was always pressing down on her, pressing down. Vic only had breath enough in her lungs for another minute or two. Her heart was racing, burning through her oxygen, not prepared for this. Not ready to see this. Not ready for her mother to die.

She couldn’t scream beneath the sand. There were no divers to hear the shouts rising up in her throat. Nowhere for that rage to go. But something inside Vic burst, something like a great wall meant to hold back the years and years. It toppled all at once, anger flowing outward, a power she’d honed in the deepest of sand now surging through her suit. That power exploded; it raged in the deadly spill from that tumbling dune; and the muscle to lift a motor, a car, to rip the roof off an ancient skyscraper, billowed forth.

There was a rumbling in the earth, a swelling, a press of sand from beneath, and the Honey Hole creaked upward, out of the spill, Vic screaming and crying beneath the sand where no diver could hear her, hands curled into claws of rage and effort, the sand spilling into her mouth and onto her tongue, sand soaked in beer and tasting of the awful past, and a grumble, a grumble as the world tilted and walls popped and sand flowed from orifices, out of windows and doors, flowing like warm honey, like blood and milk, draining from that awful place where the past had long been buried, as the Honey Hole rose out of the desert and settled, shuddering, atop the dunes.

The Honey Hole—full of the spitting and coughing and bewildered and dead—was sickeningly saved. And Vic, exhausted again in that place, terrified and weeping, collapsed to the ground outside her mother’s door, her mother’s open door, blood coming only from her ears and nose this time.